Skyrim and Fallout have reached one billion mod downloads

Bethesda has just announced at its E3 conference that there have been one billion mod downloads for Fallout and Skyrim, highlighting modding as a key part of studio’s “legacy of innovation”.

Speaking at the conference, Director of Publishing at Bethesda, James Altman, and Chief Technology Officer at ID Software, Robert Duffy, said that the studio was a pioneer in downloadable content and the first to bring mods to consoles. Since they had done that in 2016, the number of mod downloads across Fallout and Skyrim had hit one billion.

This is a pretty huge number, but given the ongoing popularity of the games’ mods, perhaps it’s not so surprising. Particularly notable mods we’ve covered in the past include the ability to block arrows Witcher 3-style in Skyrim, and one that adds comic book cel-shading effects in Fallout 4. The community seems to be thriving, and with Bethesda’s own Creation Club providing a source of mods for gamers, maybe this number will just continue to climb.

The modding scene for Skyrim has even stretched beyond the original game. There are breakaway modding projects such as Skyrim Together, a mod that allows players to tackle the game’s single-player story as a group in an online multiplayer format, and Skyblivion, which looks to rebuild The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion into Skyrim’s engine.